On June 17th, the Croatian rock group Thompson, named after the Thompson
submachine gun, staged a monster concert in the huge Maksimir sports
stadium in Zagreb, Croatia. On July 2nd, the New York Times ran a
news analysis that began:

“On a hot Sunday evening in June, thousands of
fans in a packed stadium here in the Croatian capital gave a Nazi
salute as the rock star Marko Perkovic shouted a well-known slogan
from World War II.”-- “Fascist Overtones from Blithely Oblivious
Rock Fans,” by Nicholas Wood, New York Times[1]

Thousands of people giving the Nazi salute? It sounds
like a nightmare.

The fascist salute was born of Italian dictator Benito
Mussolini’s self-parodying obsession with imitating the Roman Empire. (Italian Fascists
still proudly, and ludicrously, call it the Roman salute.)

The German Nazi
Party, always on the alert for something to be proud of,
picked up the salute as did various clerical-fascist groups, such as the Falange in Spain…

…and the Ustashe in Croatia, who
combined the fascist salute with what the Times calls “a well-known slogan from World War II,” as demonstrated
in the video below, shot before the start of the Zagreb Thompson concert.

Since the video is in Serbo-Croatian, let me give you the gist:
People are talking, waiting for the concert to begin, and some begin to
chant the Ustashe’s two-part slogan,
with some Croats shouting ‘Za dom,’ meaning ‘For home,’ and others answering
‘Spremni,’ meaning ‘Ready.’ As they chant, the crowd members thrust their arms
upwards and forward,
their numbers increasing until most of the
crowd is giving the fascist salute.

[If the above video is removed from youtube, we will upload our
own copy and post the link at footnote [3] ]

Tens of thousands of Croats – the Maksimir stadium
holds 60,000 and it was filled – giving the Ustasha fascist salute,
and this in a Croatia whose World War II regime, installed by the
invading Nazi German army, killed well over a million ‘foreign elements,’
Serbs, Roma ('Gypsies'), Jews.

The Times reports that the concert-goers
“appeared to be in their teens and early 20s,” that is, of military age,
and this in a Croatia whose 1991 secession launched years of devastating
war. A Croatia that, this coming October, will host major NATO military
maneuvers. [4]

For me this is horrible. Not so for the New York
Times. Throughout their news-analysis, the Times presents arguments –
their own, those of a Croatian government minister, of Thompson leader
Marko Perkovic, and of a few of his critics and defenders – all
effectively weakening
the impact of the opening paragraph about those thousands giving the
Nazi salute. We get the overall impression that, while there may be a problem
here, it isn't serious.

The Times begins trying to create this
impression in their headline: “Fascist Overtones from Blithely
Oblivious Rock Fans.” Meaning: the Croats don't understand
the 'implications' of the Croatian fascist salute.

Having found the younger Croats guilty of being
oblivious, the Times reaches a similar verdict regarding their
elders. In a note appended to the online version
of the article, the Times describes it as dealing with
“insensitive references
to the Holocaust made by public figures and others in Croatia.” (For
quoted material, see footnote [1])

The young are oblivious; the old are insensitive.
Nobody means any harm.

===================================

The problem is, the Times is lying

===================================

I will show that the Thompson concert was a Croatian
Ustasha (clerical-fascist) rally set to music, as shown in this
Zagreb concert video:

[If the above video is removed from youtube, we will upload our
own copy and post the link at footnote [5] ]

This concert-rally isn't the tip of the iceberg of a
fascism that only now threatens Croatia. It is the tip of the
iceberg of – Croatia.

Since seceding from Yugoslavia in 1991, Croatia has been dominated by Ustasha
ideas and pursued Ustasha goals. The Croatian
secessionists even exhumed the World
War II Ustasha symbols although by doing so they risked being
internationally identified as fascists, since it is easier for outsiders
to spot the Ustasha slogans, salute, flag, currency and uniforms than it
is for them to recognize Ustasha ideas and goals.

The Croats at this concert, mostly born around the time Croatia
seceded from Yugoslavia, are not oblivious. They are the
product of 'independent' Croatia, the eloquent evidence of its nature. They
give the Nazi salute because they were raised as Croatian clerical-fascists. For them, the Ustashe are national-religious
heroes: role models.

=============================================

The Times minimizes Ustasha crimes

=============================================

I will show that in this article the Times has
reduced, by about 90%, and without explanation, the number of victims of
Croatian Ustasha death camps, as reported by the New York Times
prior to Croatian secession in 1991.

While it is true that racist murder is an abomination,
whether the racists murder one person or a million, the numbers make an
immense difference. For one thing, by drastically reducing the
extent of Ustasha crimes, the Times lessens the impact of their
own claim that masses of Croats are insensitive regarding Ustashe
crimes, not to mention my argument, that the Ustasha are back in power
in today's Croatia, albeit with a bizarre coating of liberal rhetoric.

=================================================

Young Croats are not just "blithely oblivious"

=================================================

How could Croats be “oblivious” to the “fascist
overtones” of giving the Croatian Ustasha salute, as the Times
claims? Does the Times
think they are comatose?
Or perhaps that we are?

Croatia was an ally of Nazi Germany. Of course, an American, Indian
or Chinese might not know
this, but Croats know.

Croatia sent thousands of volunteers - fathers,
grandfathers and great grandfathers of people in Croatia today - to the Russian
front. These Ustasha volunteers hacked a path of terror
through Ukraine and Russia and fought beside the
German Nazis at
Stalingrad, where 600,000 Soviets were killed: the decisive battle of World War II.

Based on the terrible struggle of ordinary people at
Stalingrad,
unequalled in any battle in modern times, the Soviets
beat the Nazi Germans and their allies, such as the Croatian Ustashe.

We owe an unpayable debt to the people of Stalingrad. If the Croatian volunteers and their
friends had won, some of
us might now be giving the Nazi salute, and many of us would be dead.

I will prove that in the 1990s the Croatian Defense
Department produced a book, distributed by Croatia's biggest schoolbook company, celebrating
the Croatian Ustasha military, including, indeed especially, the Ustashe who
volunteered to fight at Stalingrad. Using this book and other evidence I
will
show that the concert-goers had to understand the
meaning of the Nazi salute.

=================================================

Is singer Marko Perkovic oblivious too?

=================================================

According to the Times, Marko Perkovic,
Thompson band leader and star of the Zagreb concert, denies any
association with the Ustashe:

“In an interview, the soft-spoken singer said he
had never raised his own arm to make a fascist salute. Nor, he said,
did he encourage people to wear Ustashe uniforms. As for the Ustashe
slogan he uses, he claims it is a traditional Croatian salute that
predates World War II.” -- New York Times, July 2, 2007 - Please see footnote
[1]

In the excerpt quoted above, the Times
seems neutral.
But earlier in "Blithely Oblivious," the Times supports Perkovic,
reporting that the "Home! Ready!" chant and fascist
salute that Perkovic led at the Zagreb concert "seemed to lack any
conscious political overtones.” So Perkovic is oblivious too.

I will show that the Times ignores the evidence
in their own article that Perkovic is lying.

Even more serious: the Times fails to report that for many years the "soft-spoken" Marko Perkovic has
sung songs celebrating the Croatian Holocaust.

This is not just a rumor.

After first claiming he could not remember whether he
had sung such songs, on Jan. 7, 2004 Marko Perkovic
published a 'Dear friends'
letter on the Thompson homepage stating, indeed boasting,
that he had, and what of it?

As you will see, in one of these songs Perkovic fondly
recalls a Ustasha "slaughterhouse" and says "I am Ustasha!"

Since now, three years later, the Perkovic letter is
not on the Thompson
home page, and since Perkovic denies ever encouraging support for the Ustashe,
how does TENC know he made this "Dear Friends" confession in 2004?
That it's not just rumor?

We know because we have a backup of the Thompson
website from January 2004, and it includes the letter. You
can view the page in Serbo-Croatian, and you can read an English
translation of the letter. [6]

Are these songs really monstrous enough to warrant
calling Perkovic's "Dear friends" letter a confession? And if
they are so bad, why did Perkovic admit singing them?

Let us consider the second question first.

=============================================

Why Perkovic confessed

=============================================

Despite the boastful tone of his "Dear friends"
letter, Perkovic was forced to write it in response to a broadside
attack from the muckraking [7]
Croatian website index.hr, which accused him of singing songs of love
for fascist murder.

(It is ironic that index.hr made, and proved, this
accusation against Perkovic, the favorite of the Croatian right, because
just two years later, in December 2006, they would prove a similar
accusation against Croatian
president Stjepan Mesić, the favorite Croatian 'antifascist,'
so-called, of the international community, so-called.) [8]

On Dec. 28, 2003, index.hr published the article,
"Thompson: Homeland-lover or Fascist? The definitive answer is..." In
this piece, authors Matija Babić and Neven Barković reported that on numerous
pro-Ustasha Internet sites one could download audio files of Perkovic
singing various clerical-fascist songs, including:

A) “Here comes
dawn, here comes day, here come Jure and Boban,” in which Perkovic lovingly
recalls Jure Francetić and Rafael Boban, commanders of Croatia's
own SS military force (that's
'SS' as in German Nazi SS), the Black Legion,
which specialized in slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Roma
(“Gypsies”) and Jews in their villages. This apart from the 600,000 to
700,000 or more whom the Ustashe butchered in death
camps.

B) “Jasenovac and Gradiška Stara,”
which celebrates the Jasenovac death camp complex and also the
Croatian Ustashe's return to power in 1990.
(If you wish to learn about Jasenovac, please see Encyclopedia of the
Holocaust article at
http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm#III )

The second index.hr article, published Jan. 3. 2004,
has the lengthy title:

"'Jasenovac'
and 'Here Comes Dawn' Were Sung by Thompson and Supporting Vocalist Tiho Orlic in Concert in Osijek In 2002"

In it, index.hr reported:

"After the publication of the text [of the first
article] we received numerous emails in which visitors, wishing
to remain anonymous, mentioned that they were present at a
performance of the same song by Thompson in Oscar Disco in Offenbach
near Frankfurt in 2001, at a concert in Cleveland, a concert on the
occasion of the Days of Mourning in Kupres [Bosnia-Herzegovina],
etc."--- "'Jasenovac' and 'Here Comes Dawn' Were Sung by Thompson
and Supporting Vocalist Tiho Orlic in Concert in Osijek In 2002"
[9]

According to index.hr, at first Perkovic responded by
trying to
stonewall, telling the media he couldn't
remember singing "Jasenovac." (If he hadn't sung
it, how could he not remember?)

Index.hr assisted Perkovic by posting audio files of him
singing "Jasenovac" at a Thompson concert in the city of Osijek in 2002.
This jolted his memory. As reported in the third index.hr article,
"Thompson: I did sing 'Jasenovac' - so what?" published Jan. 8, 2004,
Perkovic did an about-face and admitted (indeed boasted) on his website that
he had been singing "Jasenovac" since the early 1990s because by singing
such songs his band was:

"...expressing our rebellious spirit and
determination to deal with those [Serbian] beasts and finally
to defeat them, and these songs caused fear among them."

After 2000, said Perkovic, he sang his odes to the
Holocaust in order to fight communism.

To access Thompson's Jan. 2004 home page, with the
"Dear Friends" (Dragi prijatelji) confession in Serbo-Croatian, or to read an English
translation, please see footnote [6].
For links to index.hr's three Thompson exposés in Serbo-Croatian, please see footnote
[9].

Next we will consider: what is so bad about the song
"Jasenovac"?

And then we will ask: why, as the Times also
forgot to report,is the Croatian Catholic
church sponsoring Marko Perkovic and his band Thompson?

=============================================

Thompson's "rebellious spirit"

=============================================

Youtube.com has several uploads of Perkovic and his
Thompson band performing "Jasenovac." In the link posted
below, their performance is accompanied by film and video footage of, in
the order of appearance:

5) Members of the SS Black Legion in Ustasha black giving the German Nazi/Croatian
fascist salute;

6) The Thompson band performing in Ustasha black;

7) More Black Legion;

8) Contemporary Croatian scenes and politicians;

9) Croatian 'poglavnik' (fuehrer) Pavelic greeting
Adolph Hitler.

.

[If the above
video is removed from youtube, we will upload our own copy and post
the link at footnote [10]]

The movie footage is about Nazism, yet the music is
cheerful and light-hearted: the music of celebration.

What is Perkovic celebrating?

"Jasenovac" begins:

"Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška
that's the house of Maks' butchers
There was a slaughterhouse in Capljina" [11]

Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška were,
respectively, the main site and the main women's camp in Croatia's
Jasenovac death camp complex, a network of murder-factories. The vast
majority of victims never saw the inside of these death camps. On
arrival, most of the hundreds of thousands of kidnapped Serbs and the
smaller numbers of Jews and Roma were taken to nearby fields and,
killed, usually by a blow to the head with a wooden mallet, then pushed,
in groups, into nearby pits that were hidden from sight, apparently so
the victims would not know they were going to be murdered, and resist.
That is what forensic anthropologists found when they opened
sample graves in 1964. [12]

The Croatian government (for example, in its recent
exhibition at Jasenovac [13])
has tried to downplay this nightmare by portraying Jasenovac as a labor
camp where some tens, not hundreds of thousands, died, due to some bad
conditions or abuse by individual Ustashe. A harsh labor camp,
perhaps, but not a complex of extermination camps set up for the purpose
of eliminating the three target groups (Serbs, Jews, Roma).

But Perkovic attempts no such revision. He is proud of
the extermination campaign. He calls Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška "the
house of Maks' butchers." Maks was Vjekoslav 'Maks' Luburić, top
Jasenovac commander, and his butchers were the Ustashe. Similarly
Perkovic sings of "a slaughterhouse in Capljina."

Capljina, a town near the Neretva River in
Herzegovina, is in the area to which the Ustashe gave the name 'Herzeg-Bosna.' This is
a part of Herzegovina that the
Black Legion SS rendered virtually serbenrein during World War
II. (The largest and best-known town in the area is Mostar.) The worst
Ustasha murderers came from 'Herzeg-Bosna,' through which the river
Neretva flows to the Adriatic.

The Ustashe threw many thousands of victims into
Yugoslav rivers,
dead or mortally wounded, and Perkovic sings, accompanied by
the cheerful ethnic music:

“There was a slaughterhouse in Capljina
The Neretva carried away many Serbs
Hey, Neretva, flow downhill,
Carry Serbs into the blue Adriatic ”

Imotski, a town in Perkovic's home region of Dalmatia,
is also part of the Ustasha-invented 'Herzeg-Bosna.' Jure Francetić
commanded the Croatian Black Legion SS, made up of volunteers - the
worst killers.

Perkovic's point: the mass-murdering Ustasha SS volunteers are
back.

Lest there be any doubt that this is in fact what he means,
Perkovic next sings:

“I am Ustasha and so was my father, father left
craft to his son.”

The Ustashe had one 'craft': slaughter. They designed a special knife,
the Srbosjek(pronounced 'Serbosyek'), with a small blade, curved
for cutting throats, attached to a half-glove that hid the blade from
sight so victims wouldn't be forewarned.

The next few lines will be confusing unless you know
that, when, in the middle of World War II, the Ustashe realized the Nazis were
going to lose, they divided into two groups. One group (let us call them the diehards) kept fighting
even after the war ended, then went into exile, setting up a well-heeled Ustasha apparatus in the Croatian Diaspora from Canada to Australia.
Supported and protected by the Vatican and Western states, the Ustasha
flourished, conducting terrorist attacks on Yugoslav diplomats and
non-Ustasha Croats, and then, in the late 1980s, helped finance and
lead the secessionist movement that rules Croatia today.

The other Ustasha group (let us call
them the chameleons) stayed in Croatia, distancing themselves from the
diehards, even pretending to be Partisans. By war's end, as current Croatian president Mesić
has boasted [14],
they had done such a good job that Croatia, a Nazi
slaughterhouse/butcher state (as Perkovic puts it), was able to sit
at the winner's table. The result: Croatia
and its key institutions paid virtually no price for killing well over a
million people. Croatia returned none of the billions (in today's
dollars) stolen from Serbs, Jews and Roma. Croatia paid no
reparations. And the huge Ustasha apparatus, closely entwined with the
Catholic Church, suffered relatively little: after a brief period of
some punishment right after World War II, thousands of
Ustashe were left free and many - especially the chameleons - were
active in the institutions of socialist Yugoslavia, despite having committed
crimes on a scale that, in World War II Europe, was matched only by the
Nazis in Poland and the
eastern Soviet Union.

==============================

Ustasha chameleons, once again

==============================

In 1995, after Croatian military forces fulfilled the
Ustasha dream of driving hundreds of
thousands of Serbs from their ancestral lands in and near Croatia,
Croatia's sponsors – Germany, the Vatican
and the US – began pressing Croatian leaders to tone down displays of
Ustasha symbols and adopt 'civil society' rhetoric. By today, ten
years later, the Croatian establishment has partly acquiesced, at least
somewhat, at least in public. Chameleons all.

Their attempts at verbal self-reinvention make for
black humor, as when Marko Perkovic, the Ustasha prima donna, tells
the Times he never encouraged fascism. Who him?

Although Perkovic is now himself a chameleon, in the
"Jasenovac" song he joked about the Ustashe who, in order to blend in
with their Communist surroundings from 1945 to 1990, stopped celebrating Catholic holidays. (The Catholic church
is charged with supporting the Ustashe - a true accusation, as I will
demonstrate.)

By 1991 the
Ustashe were back in power, thus eliminating the need for the fake-Partisans to
shun the Catholic church. In
"Jasenovac," which Perkovic first performed in 1991, he jokes
about these newly emerging Catholics:

“Who could imagine last year That Partisans would
[now] celebrate Christmas?”

In the next line, he obscenely attacks those who
have not been quick enough to show enthusiasm for the return of Ustasha power:

“Who said, [may] his father f--- him, That
the Black Legion is not coming back?!”

Perkovic ends with an affectionate goodbye to
Jasenovac and Ante Pavelic, the dictator who boasted that
his Croatia was first to ‘solve’ the Jewish ‘problem.’ The village of
Metkovic, mentioned below, is included in the area of so-called 'Herzeg-Bosna,'
that geographical invention of the Ustashe. Metkovic is located
near the mouth of the Neretva River, close to a very small part of the Adriatic coast
that communist chief Tito had given to the Yugoslav Republic, Bosnia-Herzegovina
.

TENC can not argue that in "Blithely Oblivious" the Times
misinforms its readers about the role of the Catholic church regarding
Marko Perkovic since the article makes no mention of the Catholic
church.

This is remarkable because just two months before the
Times article appeared, the Catholic church was involved in a
major fight over a church-sponsored concert in Sarajevo, Bosnia, a
concert featuring none other than Marko Perkovic. As we shall see, one
of the issues that came up in that fight was whether Marko Perkovic had
sung the "Jasenovac" song.

Regarding the Sarajevo concert, here in brief is what
you did not learn from the New York Times:

In April 2007, the Croatian Catholic Charities
Association (Hrvatsko katoličko dobrotvorno društvo or HKDD) -
translation: the Croatian Catholic church - announced they were sponsoring a Thompson concert to
be held in Sarajevo, in the Zetra Arena, site of the 1984
Olympics. The date: May 10. The occasion: the tenth anniversary of Pope
John Paul II's visit to Sarajevo. A major event.

On May 9, one day before the concert, following
protests, and claiming concerns for security, the Catholic Charities
organization - in other words, the Catholic church - cancelled
the concert.

The Sarajevo concert was opposed by
various groups for various reasons. During the protests over
the concert, Father Anto Jelic, head of Catholic Charities, directed
harsh words at one outsider: Efraim Zuroff of the Jerusalem office of
the Simon Wiesenthal Center (named after, but otherwise unrelated to the
late Simon Wiesenthal). The Croatian news website, Javno.com,
reported that Mr. Zuroff had said:

"The question is this: what is he [i.e., Perkovic
-J.I.] going to sing about? Killing Serbs, killing Muslims?"--- "Thompson Will Sing about Killing of
Muslims, Serbs," April 5, 2007, Javno.com[15]

Zuroff's point was partly valid; partly because, while
it is clear that Perkovic has sung songs rejoicing in the killing of
Serbs, I have seen zero evidence of him singing about killing
Muslims.

Perkovic's most horrible songs are celebrations of mass murder in
Ustasha greater Croatia during the Holocaust. In that ultra-Catholic statelet, the Ustasha
rulers gave Muslims the protected 'racial' designation of 'Croats
of the Muslim faith.' Perkovic's favorite Ustasha group, the Black
Legion SS, targeted them for recruitment. Recruitment, not death.

The US
Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) - which, contrary to what one might
think, is controlled by the US government, not by Jewish organizations -
has taken a position consistent with Mr. Zuroff's falsification. [16]

In its web pages on Jasenovac, the USHMM puts forward
what is in fact a lie, claiming that
the Ustashe murdered Muslims "for
religious and political rather than racial reasons"
but that "there are no reliable statistics on Muslim victims." Indeed, there are also no unreliable statistics, because until 2001,
when the USHMM made this announcement about the lack of statistics, nobody
had reported that Muslims were killed for being Muslims at
Jasenovac. (Please see footnote [16] ]

Not that the Ustashe were
disinterested in Muslims. Below is a Croatian Black Legion SS recruiting poster.
Notice the fez, the cap denoting Islamic extremism. Notice the
minaret (tower of a mosque) in the mid-right background. The message to
fascists among the Muslims: Join your big brothers, the fascists among
Catholics.

A recruiting poster for the
Croatian Ustasha SS (as in Nazi SS) Black Legion. The poster was aimed
in part at Bosnian Muslims; hence, one soldier is shown wearing a
fez, the hat of fanatical Islam, and the town in the background
includes a minaret (middle-right), part of a mosque.

The top line reads: "Croats of
Herzeg-Bosnia!" Underneath is the crooked double S of the Nazi
SS, plus the Ustasha checkerboard flag, brought back when Croatia
seceded from Yugoslavia, for the second time, in 1991.

Two soldiers, presumably a Catholic and a Muslim, trample the
Communist flag. The text reads: "The Great leaders Adolf Hitler
and poglavnik [fuehrer] Dr. Ante Pavelic are calling you to
defend your homes. Join the volunteer units of Croatian SS."

According to javno.com, Zuroff also said: "Thompson does
not do Croatia credit."

At first this sounds
reasonable: Perkovic and his band certainly don't make Croatia look good. But
on second thought, doesn't this beg the question? Namely, 'In what kind
of society could someone like Perkovic, who sings songs celebrating
the Holocaust,be the Number 1 rock star in the first place?'

The answer is, in a society whose culture was transformed
- homogenized, in the worst sense - by Ustasha terror and genocide
during World War II. A society in which, from 1945 to 1990, the
communist authorities pushed under the rug the immense problem of the fascist
indoctrination of Croats; in which the authorities were satisfied as long as everybody
paid lip service to the official slogan, 'Brotherhood and Unity.' (The same
thing happened in East Germany, now also a hotbed of fascism.)

A society in which the Ustashe, again returned to power,
have again
decimated the ranks [17] of real anti-fascist intellectuals,
of whatever ethnicity, and in which the new Ustashe have
eliminated virtually all Serbs whose family lines were not completely
wiped out the last time around.

"The organiser of the concert, [Reverend] Don Anto
Jelic of the Croatian Catholic Charity Society, is embittered by
Zuroff’s statements.

"'I think such statements are malevolent. Let him prove that
Thompson ever sang against Serbs, Muslims or Jews' – says Don Jelic,
who had told Javno earlier that he had not heard a recording of
Thompson singing the notorious “Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara” song,
adding that the question should be put to Thompson.'"(From javno.com; please see footnote [15] )

A few points.

First, Rev.
Jelic was not the organizer of
this concert, in the practical sense, the person who does the grunt work
to make something happen. He was and is the Chairman of the Croatian Catholic
Charity (HKDD). [18]

Second, given a charity concert commemorating an event
as important to the Catholic hierarchy as the tenth anniversary of the
pope's visit to Sarajevo, and a star as prominent and notorious for
Ustasha politics as Perkovic, it is not believable that Rev. Jelic
decided to stage this concert using the venue of Sarajevo's Olympic
stadium without the knowledge of Croatian Cardinal Josip Bozanic, and
therefore of the Vatican.

By deciding in this dramatic fashion to give their
blessing to Perkovic, the church hierarchy was not merely embracing a
prominent fascist, because Perkovic is not merely a prominent fascist.
He is a devoutly religious prominent fascist.

Marko Perkovic interviewed at concert in
Maksimir stadium, July 17.

Devout fascist?

At concerts, Perkovic always wears a St. Benedict's
Medallion, most intense of Catholic medals. The Thompson home page features
images of the medallion and a
Catholic church that Perkovic is raising money to build. His
trademark crusader's sword symbolizes the Catholic church
militant. Since Holocaust fascism in Croatia was clerical
fascism, the big question is: where does the Catholic church
hierarchy stand on Thompson. The unfortunate answer: they
champion him.

And the Catholic church didn't just choose Perkovic as
their standard bearer, knowing full well that he would remind people
that the Ustashe were clerical fascists, i.e., knowing
full well that this would mean picking a big fight.They did
more; they used the inevitable resulting storm of controversy as an
occasion to publicly and haughtily dismiss criticisms of Perkovic.

Do Rev. Jelic and the hierarchy that he represents - do
they claim they are unaware of the huge scandal in 2003-2004, in which
index.hr exposed Perkovic as singing songs lauding the Holocaust?

Did none of these gentlemen read Perkovic's "Dear
Friends" letter, in which he stated that the fact that he sang those
songs "is well known to all of us" and that:

"therefore this makes their [index.hr's]
sensational discovery ridiculous to say the least." -- From English translation,
below.

The Perkovic "Dear friends" letter has been deleted
from the Thompson website, so if the Vatican and Cardinal Bozanic missed
them, they will want to check footnote [6] where we link to the TENC
backup of Thompson's January 2004 home page, which includes the Perkovic
confession.

And, in case the Vatican has difficulty with the
Serbo-Croatian language - because that is what the language spoken
in Croatia (and Serbia and Bosnia) was called before the German-Vatican
strategy of destroying Yugoslavia dictated the discovery of three
(functionally identical) languages ludicrously named Serbian, Croatian
and Bosnian - in case the clerical gentlemen have problems with
Serbo-Croatian, thus explaining why they did not read Perkovic's
confession, which was written in that tongue, and hence are unaware of his
clerical-fascist politics - in that case, no problem.

[3] If this video is removed from
youtube, we will upload our copy and post the link here. If the
youtube video is removed and we haven't yet posted our link, please let
us know at emperorsclothes@tenc.net
Thanks.

[4]
According to the Croatian online newspaper Nacional:

"From 1 to 12 October 2007 Croatia will be the
scene of Noble Midas 07, the largest and most important
international military manoeuvre to be held in Croatia since its
independence. Some 9,000 soldiers from NATO's Response Force and
marine commandos, 50 warships, an aircraft carrier, amphibious
vehicles, frigates, cruisers, submarines and some 60 NATO member
aircraft will stage the largest NATO military exercise of the year
in the northern and central Adriatic Sea."
-- "9,000 NATO Commandos In Adriatic Operation," Nacional
Neovisni News Magazin, May 5, 2007
http://www.nacional.hr/en/articles/view/34257/18/Back up at
http://www.tenc.net/archive/9000.htm

[5] If this video is removed from
youtube, we will upload our copy and post the link here. If the
youtube video is removed and we haven't yet posted our link, please let
us know at emperorsclothes@tenc.net
Thanks.

Below is an English translation of the Perkovic letter. (It was
translated by Sinisa Djuric from the presently unavailable pavelicpapers.com website.)
If you like, you can go direct to the English
translation.

First I would like
to make a couple of points about this confession:

A) In his Jan. 7, 2004 "Dear friends" letter, Perkovic
writes that the index.hr exposé is ridiculous because he never tried to
hide the fact that he sang "Jasenovac" and "Here comes dawn."

But an index.hr piece published four days before
Perkovic's "Dear friends" letter, reports:

"Nor has Thompson attempted to
apologize regarding the words for which an excuse does not exist,
but he told Novi List
he doesn’t remember ever singing the songs, and although it
is quite clearly his voice, regarding this Thompson added that “one
can generate anything on a computer.” (My emphasis - JI)-- From "'Jasenovac' and 'Here Comes Dawn' Were Sung by
Thompson and Accompanying Vocalist Tiho Orlic in Concert in
Osijek In 2002," my translation - JI
http://www.index.hr/clanak.aspx?id=178979

I haven't seen the Novi List interview, but: a)
the rest of what index.hr reported is true, so what reason do we have to think
they made this up? b) If they pretended Perkovic was feigning amnesia
when he wasn't, they would have been discredited, so what would have
been the point? C) We know Perkovic
lied to the New York Times about never promoting fascism, so why
take his word (that he never tried to deny singing these songs) over that of index.hr
(that he feigned amnesia)?

Conclusion: it
seems reasonable to conclude that Perkovic's claim that he was always
open about singing "Jasenovac" was a lie to save face through
bravado.

B) In his 2004 "Dear friends" letter, Perkovic
presents two justifications for singing songs lauding the Holocaust.
First, he says he sang
them during the 1990s as a weapon of resistance to (supposed) Serbian
aggression. Second, he says that after 2000, he sang them as a
weapon against communism.

Regarding the Serbs, it is noteworthy that in this
2004 letter, despite his bravado, Perkovic shows signs of caving
in to Western/Vatican pressure to 'tell the Western masses what it is
appropriate for them to hear.'

Thus he puts forward his 'we had to stand up to the Serbs'
justification. This is
a long retreat from the explicit racism expressed in the song "Jasenovac," and
even from statements made
during the 1990s by politicians supposedly less extreme than Perkovic.
For example, consider the 1995 speech Croatian president Tudjman made during a railroad tour of Croatia, celebrating the
bloody expulsion of a
quarter million Serbs from the Krajina region, bordering Croatia.

Tudjman was the leader of the HDZ (Hrvatska
Demokratska Zajednica or Croatian Democratic Union) which now runs
Croatia, supposedly less extreme than the HSP (Hrvatska Stranka
Prava or Croatian Party of
Rights), which was always the most openly Ustasha. Perkovic is an HSP cultural
icon.

In 1995, here is what Tudjman
said about the Serbs, as recorded and translated by the BBC Monitoring
service:

"And [applause - BBC] there can be no return to
the past, to the times when
they the Serbs were spreading cancer in the heart of Croatia, cancer
which was destroying the Croatian national being and which
did not allow the Croatian people to be the master in its own house
and did not allow Croatia to lead an independent and sovereign life
under this wide, blue sky and within the world community of
sovereign nations."
(My emphasis - J.I.)-- Tudjman, Speech made during 'Freedom Train' journey,
http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/tudj.htm

According to Tudjman, the Serbs were
"cancer" - exactly the sort of
disease metaphor Nazi-types use when describing 'racial' enemies.
Straight-forward Ustasha stuff, no pretense of standing up to supposed
Serbian aggression. Rather, the presence of Serbs is in itself an
aggression against some undefined (because indefinable) Croatian "national
being."

It is worth noting that Tudjman spoke
in the same way that fascist organizers and
parties, such as the British National Party (BNP) now speak, spreading hysteria about
the presence of 'foreign elements,' i.e., non-white immigrants in countries portrayed as the
property of some "European race," a new invention, to replace all the
old little races, or perhaps not, perhaps just a restatement of that oldest
standby, the "white race."

For purposes of fascist organizing, the
racially European, or Europeanly racial (take your pick), countries now
include everybody from Russia (which these same fascists used to say was
full of 'racially' inferior Slavs, who are now, miraculously, for
purposes of the fascist attempt to woo Russians, discovered to be
European!) to Australia, and including the USA, or at
least the southern part. (The fact that modern genetics has established
conclusively that there are no human races in no way mitigates
the need to prevent the corruption of the white one. Pardon me, the
European one.)

Anyway, in contrast to Tudjman in 1995, Perkovic in
2004 virtually cowered, giving in to Western pressure to dissemble
even as he struck a false-macho pose of boastfully defending his singing
of fascist songs.

As for Perkovic's
after-2000-we-sang-it-to-fight-communism justification:

First, in the song "Jasenovac," Perkovic fondly reminisces
about how the Ustashe murdered Serbian peasants, for example by throwing
them mortally wounded into the
Neretva River:

"Hey, Neretva, flow downhill,
Carry Serbs into the blue Adriatic"

What does that have to do with communism?

Second, in any case, to call the government of the late Ivica
Račan, in power from 2000 until the end of 2003, 'communist,' is an
offense against meaning. In the 1990s, ex-communist chief Račan was
a cosmetically left leader of the loyal opposition to Franjo Tudjman,
creating a political space for Croats to support the Ustasha goals of
destroying Yugoslavia and creating an ethnically 'pure' Croatia while
they told themselves they were independent of Tudjman. Hence I call him 'cosmetically left.'

Račan's 2000-2003 government, literally a creation of the
National Democratic Institute, which is part of the National Endowment for
Democracy - the Račan government played the important role of giving Croatia a less violent
image, thus facilitating its international integration, while actually changing
nothing. Despite discourse about being kinder towards 'minorities' -
which, for starters, accepts the Ustasha idea, introduced by the
secessionists in 1989-1990, that the non-Catholic Serbs were external to
the lands their ancestors had inhabited for many generations - despite this
discourse, there was:

* no serious repatriation
of evicted Serbs;

* no serious campaign to
combat virulent racism, without which the Serbs' return would be impossible;

* no campaign to punish the vast array of criminals who
evicted and murdered Serbs, which by the way includes the 'international
community,' since the US, Germany and the Vatican were intimately
involved in Croatia's war against ordinary Serbian people;

* no compensation for the theft and destruction of
the Serbs' property, worth billions, not to mention for the torture and
murder of thousands.

Just a government with a prettier face so that the
'international community' could sell ordinary people in the West the
idea that antifascism was making headway in Croatia.

(Regarding the role of the National Democratic Institute
or NDI, which is part of the National Endowment for Democracy, in organizing the Ivica Račan forces, see
http://www.ndi.org/about/newsletter/2000/win2000reports.pdf
Their article on Croatia starts on p. 1, lower right. It is, of course, NDI spin, but it makes clear that the claim that the Račan government
was 'communist' is simply absurd. By the way, the National
Endowment for Democracy is the same folks that brought us the coup in
Yugoslavia in October 2000. For more on the outside preparation of
that coup, see the transcript of the July 29, 1999 US Senate hearings on
Yugoslavia at
http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/hearin.htm )

Here is Marko Perkovic, trying to act contemptuous
even as
he confesses that index.hr was telling the truth:

[Marko Perkovic's letter starts here]

"Dear friends!

"First of all, I would like to emphasize to you
that my official website is the only true source of information
about me and my opinion and you can find this in articles edited by
the administrator.

"We are witnesses of yet another insane campaign, which, because of
their election defeat, hysterical Communists and their collaborators
are starting against me.

"This time they have discovered warm water; They have 'discovered'
that I've been singing songs like 'Here Comes Dawn...',
'Jasenovac...' and similar.

"I am not the author of these songs, but I have been singing them,
which is well known to all of us, during a certain period everywhere
in Croatian squares and in halls without hiding, therefore this
makes their sensational discovery ridiculous to say the least.

"And this is when and why I've been singing them. These songs I've
been singing with hundreds of thousands of Croats during the
Patriotic War when Chetnik [i.e., Serbian - J.I.] aggression
endangered the very existence of the Croatian state and the people,
when thousands of Croatian young men died defending our values and
lives from Chetnik knives.

"These songs we have been singing in spite to the enemy, expressing
our rebellious spirit and determination to stand up to those beasts
and to finally defeat them, and these songs caused fear among them.

"After the 3rd of January 2000 when Croatia stumbled and power was
taken over by the Communists, there were unbelievable derogations,
insults, humiliations and persecutions of Croatian defenders,
generals, intellectuals and prominent public personalities and
everything sacred to the Croatian people. All over Croatia 'Over
forests and hills' [a Partizan song - S.D.] was being sung, the
Croatian army had been declared an aggressor, warrants were issued,
bounties were offered for their betrayal... Then we were again
saying to the vampire-like Communists, with that and similar songs,
that we are not afraid of them and that we will resist them and
protect our values at any cost.

"And today, when they are finally on their knees, they are trying
with these sorts of low blows and by declaring me a Fascist, Nazi
and similar, to cause as much harm as possible to me and to the
entire homeland.

"Dear friends, do not pay attention to them, they are a matter of
the past and never again will Communists and Chetniks tell us what
we can and cannot sing in our homeland.

"Dear friends, we should turn to the future. Thank God, now again we
have Croatian authorities and we have no more need to express our
dissatisfaction in this or similar ways, but we need to spend all
our energy by contributing to the common welfare and progress of our
nation and our state."

[Marko Perkovic's letter ends here]

[7] Muckraking • noun
the action of searching out and publicizing scandal about famous people.
— ORIGIN coined by President Theodore Roosevelt in a speech (1906)
alluding to the man with the muck rake in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
-- Compact Oxford Dictionary
http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/muckraking?view=uk ]

[10] If this video is removed
from youtube, we will upload our own copy and post the link here. If you
find that the youtube video has been removed and we haven't posted the
new link, please write emperorsclothes@tenc.net
Thanks.

[11]
The translation is from the
eurofascism.com website at
http://tinyurl.com/2my6hm
You can find other translations on google.com

[12] The information comes from my as yet
unpublished interview of Prof. Srboljub Zivanovic, who was part of a
team of three forensic anthropologists and an archeologist who excavated
a sampling of mass graves at Jasenovac in 1964. Zivanovic emphasized
that the vast majority of victims were murdered without ever having
entered the death camp complex.

[16] Regarding US government
(indeed, State Department) control of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, please see "How the US State Department Misuses
Washington's Holocaust Museum to Market Holocaust Denial," by Jared
Israel
http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm#I.2

Regarding the quotations on supposed Muslim
persecution under Ustasha rule, they are from the Holocaust
Memorial Museum document, "Croatian WWII Concentration Camp Records Made
Available for First Time by Us Holocaust Memorial Museum; Up to
100,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma and Others Murdered in Jasenovac,"
November 13, 2001 [My emphasis - J.I.]
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/press/kits/details.php?content=jasenovac

Did you notice that right in the title of this document, the Holocaust Museum
uses its authority to set an
upper limit on the number of possible possible victims at
Jasenovac? No more than 100,000 can be said to have been murdered
in that Ustasha death camp complex.

The
hidden politics here: if 100,000 were killed, Jasenovac could have been a
brutal labor camp. But if 600,000 or more were killed, in a
territory of about 6 million, as was reported before 1991 by every
non-Ustasha source from the New
York Times to the Encyclopedia
of the Holocaust, then Jasenovac had to have been set up as an extermination center.

If 600,000 were killed, then masses of Croats must have been involved,
actively and passively, and if they
were, then so was Croatia's main moral authority, the Catholic Church.
This especially because the Ustasha exiles who took power in April 1941
were a small force. How did they succeed in a fascist Croatia that
was not subject to German occupation (as Serbia was) absent the
support of the most influential traditional organizations? And if the
Croatian church morally supported the Ustasha extermination campaign
what about the Vatican?

So a lot of dominos may tumble if the figure of 600,000 or more,
universally accepted outside pro-Ustasha circles by scholars and in the
(rare) media reports on Jasenovac, prior to the 1990s - a lot may tumble
if the figure of 600,000 or more is
not successfully, drastically reduced.

This explains the odd note struck in the
document's title - the statement that "up to 100,000" were
killed. If the authors don't know the number, how can they know the
upper limit of the number? They could say, "at least
100,000," but how can they know it is no more than 100,000?

This is not the language of
honest historical research; it is the language of historical negotiation. The USHMM
is telling the victim-side of this 'negotiation' (Serbs, Jews, Roma):
"OK, you can mourn your victims, and we will even increase the numbers -
we'll up the figures as much as double what Franjo Tudjman wrote in his book Wastelands
-
but that's as far as we're prepared to go. 100,000 and not one victim more!"

Negotiation, not history; but then current
Jasenovac 'research' has nothing to do with history, hence the political
decision to add the category "Muslim religion" to the Ustashe's targeted
groups, even though the Ustashe accepted Muslims as 'Croats of the
Muslim faith.' Indeed, the Black Legion tried to recruit Muslims - hence, in the Black Legion
SS recruiting poster, above, there is a mosque in the
background - and they especially wanted to recruit fanatical Muslims - hence, in said recruiting poster, one of the soldiers wears a fez, symbol of Muslim
extremism. The Ustashe could have persecuted the religion of Islam, or they could
have recruited the most fanatical Muslims, but does the Holocaust Museum (and
Mr. Zuroff) contend they did both?

Of course, the Ustashe undoubtedly killed some Muslims who were accused of being
Communists, a blanket term used to cover all opponents. Some people
of every ethnicity and
religion were accused of being Communists and were killed, if they got caught opposing the Ustashe. But that is a horse of a
different color.
- J.I.

[18] If one goes to the
Croatian Catholic Charities Association homepage,
http://www.hkdd.hr/ and scrolls down to the end (actually using the
scroll bar) the text will appear: "Ante Jelić, predsjednik HKDD-a"
meaning Ante Jelić, chairman or president, HKDD

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